I need the thunderstorms like the mountains do

Isabel Carvalho and Susana Caló

Isabel Carvalho is an artist, publisher and carer. Her art practice combines scientific and speculative approaches and is characterised by a cross-cutting approach to social, ecological and psychological issues. With Leonorana, Isabel uses editing and publishing as a means to conduct research and forge alliances in a spirit of mutual care and solidarity. It was in this capacity that she interviewed me, and it initiated a dialogue between us that went far beyond the interview, transcending the roles of interviewer and interviewee and allowing the possibility of openness and mutual recognition. I was keen to keep this going and to learn more from Isabel’s experiences, and interviews and encounters like these allow for a live transmission of ideas. We talked about her artistic practice and the importance of care perspectives in art, her experience as a carer, ecologies of coexistence and the ways we are touched even by the smallest of things. 

Susana Caló 

My first question has to do with your personal experience as a carer. You’ve been a carer many years now, and as part of it, you’ve moved houses, changed rhythms. And now you’ve returned to the home you lived in before. I wanted to ask what that experience has been like and what impact it has had on your artistic practice. 

Isabel Carvalho 

My experience as a carer for somebody with dementia led me to discover many things. The first was that care is something reciprocal. While I provide care for this person, I also feel that I’ve had the opportunity to be cared for. Discovering this dimension of the care experience was transformative. Something else I learnt was patience and, gradually, how to stop seeing my experience as an excuse. This meant being neither too lenient with myself nor too judging myself too much on the choices I made. Of course, this isn’t easy. In a situation like this one, a lot of resentment can arise, not least because of how women have care foisted on them in a way that’s totally taken for granted and normalised, and how we deal with feeling invisible or undervalued, as well as the precarious conditions that come along with this kind of work. It’s a labour of love, sure, but it’s still labour. And whenever it takes place inside a family, it’s even more problematic because it is unpaid. As I said before the interview, I still need to develop a more systematic way of talking about my experiences. I dedicate myself to practical caregiving enriched by theory (i.e. the recent work on care in arts and critical writing). But my way of caring doesn’t start, so to speak, from theoretical knowledge or from abstract or hypothetical premises; I speak from what I experience, at close quarters. 

As for my going back to my old house, well, over time, as we required more and more carers, our house ceased to really belong to the “family”; that is, it went from being a more or less private place, intimate, with space for spontaneous shows of affection, and so on, and ended up becoming a kind of company that needed to be kept running by employees coming from all sorts of different backgrounds. This constant daily contact with others in the house requires us to always show mutual respect and be cognizant of our limits. In a way, we’ve been partaking in a sort of micro-politics: firstly by recognising the labour and value we each bring to the table and then through negotiating how we share the workload so it suits everyone. Not to say there’s no affect involved in it; quite the contrary, the familial and non-familial ties contribute equally to a continuum of affect within the bounds of the house. I think my case is quite fortunate (and I at least try to maintain a certain, perhaps naive, optimism in relation to it) because I do most of my care alongside my sister. And I can count on her, and she on me, whenever either one of us has to go away somewhere for work reasons.  

Something noteworthy happened on one such occasion, in 2016, amid a really difficult stage in my mother’s illness (Alzheimer’s progresses in stages). I was taking part in a residency in Stockholm, and a curator came to see me. But I was so preoccupied with what was going on back here in Portugal that I found it impossible to talk about anything else. The meeting was worth it in the end because she asked something I’ve been giving various answers to since – whether I thought my experience in care had altered my sense of beauty. I do now feel as if I’m in tune with a different, more profound understanding of beauty, one that often seems to test the limits of language and even go beyond it. I’m afraid that one day, when I’m far removed from the experience I’ve now become so enmeshed in, I’ll lose this new feeling for beauty. But I know it’s a radical thing. The interviews and conversations I’ve been having about this project, both with you and with friends, have made me think even more about that sense of reciprocity I mentioned earlier. So, while my art may have changed because of my experience with caregiving, being an artist probably also helped me approach care in a different way – serenely. Not long after I began, I realised that being a carer – which means dealing with prolonged periods of continuous, so-called chronic stress – isn’t compatible with other kinds of professional work. But then, in my case, I’ve been able to make it work with being an artist and a publisher. This may be because creativity itself can function as a tool for survival in “limit-situations” like these. On the other hand, these jobs are all very precarious in economic terms, and here we come to the current struggle experienced by carers: the right to care should be compatible with the right to work, but it isn't.

Susana Caló 

Care is built upon small labours, on just being there, being present with somebody. How do you view this type of work, and how do you draw on care in your art practice? 

Isabel Carvalho  

The desire to care for people and objects stems from wanting to preserve them. When Catarina Rosendo and I were inviting people to collaborate for Leonorana on the theme of “Care” – and I first got in touch with you – this was the central idea we had in mind. Care, I see now, involves respect for different ways of being in the world, and an appreciation for ways things and people exist together. When it comes to art, I’ve begun to value different aesthetic paradigms and become sensitive to those that have allowed for the representation of subjects until recently undervalued or considered insignificant. I started to want to make and see art that was revelatory, one which allowed the viewer to take notice of things they ordinarily do not take notice of, things we tend to disregard completely. Care in art is something you also see in other areas worth mentioning: think of the care given to archival work in art and curatorial work or of the care we might provide to the artists themselves. And we really must care for the people who make art. Respecting their commitments and giving them the right conditions to produce their work is an essential, vital thing. The anxiety that came with the dawn of the pandemic made us feel distinctly aware of our own mortalities, and we realised just how vulnerable we really are. There was this sense of solidarity that arose out of that. I hope it was disruptive enough that this system, which regularly neglects artists and their needs, doesn’t return to how it was before the pandemic. Besides that, an idea that particularly interests me is that of criticism as an act of care. We need new ways of thinking about criticism, don’t you think? 

Susana Caló 

It’s true, I like to think of criticism in terms of how it might be applied in a clinical context. I picked it up from studying Gilles Deleuze’s writings on literature, though I apply his thinking elsewhere too. What possible worlds and ways of living are portrayed in a work, and what can criticism do to furnish the conditions that might allow them to materialise in real life? Such an approach to criticism has a notion of care at its centre. I also wanted to discuss your interest in care communities and peer support networks in the context of alternative forms of mental healthcare. What sparked this interest of yours – and how do you choose to define mental health and mental illness? 

Isabel Carvalho  

There was at one point – I don’t know if it still exists – a group of caregivers for people suffering from dementia at the Magalhães Lemos Hospital in Oporto which I joined alongside some other relatives. At the time, it turned out I wasn’t ready to engage or take part in the group, let alone to think about alternative care methods (and there were undoubtedly possibilities for that within the group). As for now, my caregiving philosophy is centred on a conviction that the most important thing as far as mental health is social integration. To that end, a person might become part not just of one but several communities or “families”. Being part of a social network means committing to others and entering co-dependency relationships, which can be challenging but also really positive. The experience of moving into the “family” home we were speaking about earlier was itself an experiment in integrating myself into a mutual care community that, in some way, involves thinking about mental health. The “family” in the home is no longer traditional but instead a framework with an additional set of characteristics, where people often go from being complete strangers to becoming an integral part of our lives. The conversations, gestures and dramas we act out among ourselves are unlike those found in a nuclear/traditional family, and, as is the case in mutual support networks, we care for each other to support each other’s mental well-being. The reason we have to do this is simple, if not obvious: we work as a team, and if any one of us feels bad, the feeling percolates and affects all of us. I think we should work together to look after each other’s mental health in the same way we look after our physical bodies to safeguard them from illness. We must recognise each person as an individual, offer each other respect, and try to understand our individual needs. I’m obviously oversimplifying how things work in my situation because it is pretty complex. There are certain things we don’t interrogate, be it in ourselves and each other. And these things should be protected too. Because we have the right not to want to share them. As for illness itself, I dare not define it – it’s an area that requires its own tools for analysis and treatment. 

Another thing you learn as a caregiver is that sometimes responsibility for care should be given to other “carers” – and this arises from recognising our own limitations and how other professionals might be better equipped than us, especially when it comes to mental health. We shouldn’t forget that the care field is amongst those most plagued by physical and mental burnout, which merits a degree of public and political attention, something we have as yet hardly seen. That being said, I do think it’s next to impossible for caregivers (especially those caring for people with dementia) to be “mentally healthy” (at least in the most conventional sense) because this carers enter another reciprocal dynamic, experiencing adverse mental health effects not only due to their often-precarious work conditions but also because of their continual close contact with illness. In the long term, there will undoubtedly be a degree of symbiotic transfer between the caregiver and the person with dementia, even if at first one doesn’t see it. I read not long ago that prolonged stints in caregiving affect a carer’s notion of the passage of time and the breakdown and order of events. Ideally, all caregivers should have some form of psychological support, be it in group form or individually, if only to be able to talk about what they’re going through since, based on my own experience, it can be difficult many times to find someone willing to enter our world and truly listen to us. People have a negative reaction to illness. My interest in other kinds of community, returning to the beginning of my answer, comes from the sense that despite everything, this place – where I spend the vast majority of my time – is still my home. Carers often speak of the home as a kind of prison because the illness causes the people within it to end up alienated, having been compulsorily removed from public life and not having much space for themselves or outside contact. And it’s true, I do fantasise about alternative kinds of “home”, ones in which the dynamics between members might be different and different forms of co-existence are possible. I mean, I’d love to experiment with living in different kinds of spaces and under different social/communal arrangements. And not necessarily only in thinking about mental health.  

All caregivers should have some form of psychological support (...) if only to be able to talk about what they’re going through since, based on my own experience, it can be difficult many times to find someone willing to enter our world and truly listen to us. People have a negative reaction to illness.

Susana Caló 

You work a lot with writing. In the last performance I saw of yours, O Teatro das Plantas [The Theatre of Plants], I felt that your text, the way you narrated it, the sound of the words, their rhythm and their meaning all came together to create a new sense of space, one that drew us into the in-between places, to all the small parts that join together to make up our environment. It was a story about the environment that invited us to enter a reciprocal relationship with the things around us. What does writing mean to you, and what purpose do you think it serves? 

Isabel Carvalho  

That performance took its cue from a painting by Aurélia de Souza and looking at how she portrayed care in a garden environment. In the piece, I wanted to shift the focus on the artist away from her self-portraits and their humanism and instead hone in on something rarely mentioned in conversations about Aurélia: her environment. I was already working on these interviews and I am used to intertwining different projects of mine, so I may just as well have chosen to look at mental health as it manifests in Aurélia, both as a painter and as an individual, and spoken about her condition as a woman trying to become a professional artist or her sentimental angst. But in the end, I opted to construct a network of micro-narratives, split between various voices, each offering care advice. Here the plant imagery wouldn’t just be an inert backdrop or just scenery but would be alive and animated, able to speak for itself. The mother’s voice was the first I began working on, then the voices of the sisters (who later take on maternal roles with respect both to their mother and each other), then the voice of the adopted children and the voices of the animals and the plants. The development of the performance was itself a process where care was involved – it was a collaborative process, and collaboration requires acting on behalf of and together with others in shared trust. In performances, I use writing as a way of feeling close to literature, more or less, regardless of what level of literary merit people find in the end product. Writing both as part of a process and the end product is something I use to communicate. I see writing as a blessing, something we should use whenever we can and for however long we are still able to. Writing is one of the most important ways of giving an account of ourselves, to paraphrase [Judith] Butler, both to others and to us doing the writing. The construction of narratives is a form of negotiation with potential listeners or readers. I am a great believer in the idea that writing helps us construct meaning within our lives. But then, I don’t think our lives should depend on it for a second. 

Susana Caló 

We’ve also been talking about what exists beyond the bounds of language. And we discussed the traditional image of the psychotherapist’s office, designed and oriented toward facilitating interactions between two people, interactions mediated by language. The primacy of language as a means of communication is taken as a given. But then words are also noises and likewise have a material dimension. And there are many other semiotic registers beyond language and signification to which less attention is paid at the expense of more diverse and inclusive models of communication and perception. You told me that as a carer, you felt language wasn’t enough. Is this not what happens in your artistic practice? 

Isabel Carvalho 

I used to talk a lot with my mother, who was, by profession, a telephone operator. When her speech organs began to fail her, I realised we were soon no longer going to be able to talk with each other. Above all, I saw that my place in the world would change. Because I spend so much time with her, verbal language is only a small part of how I communicate nowadays. We had to adapt how we were acting – not only me but the other caregivers, too – and as part of this process, a new world of non-verbal expression opened up to me, one that I’d never had access to before. This world of alternative expression now seems to me dazzlingly vast and rich. I’ve got a lot of happiness from this discovery, and I think I’ve also incorporated it into my work. I would really like to experiment with dance and singing. I have never so much as dipped my toe in these activities. I do performances, and I know they would benefit if I expanded my scope, but I confess that being shy has prevented me from doing so. At the same time, I have begun to ponder very seriously the terrible and dangerous qualities of silence as it arises from an inability to speak. Illness expresses itself through symptoms, and in hospitals, for example, they aren’t prepared to welcome and deal with those who can’t speak. It’s always awful to imagine someone with a disability that limits their speech having to go into A&E. A lot of importance is placed on the power of words. I think they’re powerful too, but then being able to use words shouldn’t preclude other forms of communication. I don’t think we should forsake some means of expression for the sake of others, but cultivate all of them, look after them, preserve them – and I think this should be a political project. Perhaps it’s a way of seeing human communication as an ecosystem in which an immense amount of variety exists in the forms of expression available to us. But this by itself isn’t enough; we have to recognise these alternative forms and try to engage with them so that they might help us develop alternative ways of communicating. In the same vein I’m also very interested in working with the materiality of spoken language, a communication practice which recognises the nuances that come from the physical component of speech. In effect, it’s a process which involves going beyond the abstract conception of language one may have taken for granted, precisely because the ability to communicate by means of spoken language should never be taken as a given.

Susana Caló 

We have been speaking about the meaning of therapy and how you often reflect on what it is and what it means for different people. I often ask myself a similar question: what is “psychological analysis”? And what end does therapy serve? Ends are always political. At the moment, I tend to think of psychoanalysis as an act of singling out. As such, one of its virtues is allowing us to better see our own prejudices, our binary ways of thinking, and the different kinds of mental blocks we experience. So it’s valuable and works to help us become, where possible, a little less “normapathic”, to borrow a term coined by the French psychoanalyst Jean Oury. What is therapy to you? 

Isabel Carvalho 

I have had the same therapist since 2017, though I began therapy in 2008 and have had varied experiences. During this time, I have learned a few basic things (notice that I mention the process of learning a lot!). 1) Few people know exactly what therapy is or how it works, and that, it follows, there must be many different “schools” of therapy because even very good therapists are always looking to develop their understanding of their own practice; 2) therapy is something that can happen between friends and acquaintances, often in the least predictable circumstances; 3) it’s a process that begins unfolding long before you step into the consulting room, even to the degree that sometimes you don’t even feel like you need to go through the door once you get there; and 4) it works very differently for each individual, who has their own distinct reasons for choosing to seek out therapy. Personally, therapy helps me feel more at peace, but the process itself isn’t always peaceful – it can bring up a lot of stuff. As for normapathy, it’s perhaps the kind of mental illness I see as most widespread – this desire to fit in. Funnily enough, when I first started going to therapy, I thought that was how it worked, as a sort of reorientation resignedly geared toward becoming ‘normal’, but this may have just been because of some of the not-so-great experiences I had at first. The field of psychotherapy may have recently undergone specific changes too, even in academic terms. I don’t know. At least, over the years, I’ve started to see a different kind of approach to the “standard” emerging. As you said, there is a more significant investment in difference, in singling out what is unique about the patient. Other changes are happening too. Until recently, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone in our field who was open (as I have just been) about going to therapy, which has obviously got to do with the hang-ups people have about it. I remember my therapist telling me that he didn’t say hello to ‘clients when he saw them in public because if they were in the company of somebody else, they might then have to explain who he was – and the client might not want anyone knowing they went to therapy. Another development is the increasing number of men seeking therapy. I bring this up because, for those categorised as ‘naturally’ mentally unstable, i.e. women, mental healthcare is considered acceptable (even if there’s still a certain amount of stigma attached to it). In contrast, if men go to therapy, people think it’s a terrible sign since the figure of the mentally ill man isn’t programmed into the culture. He really must have cracked! I bring up the issue because I know people who didn’t go to therapy but should have, and I also know people who have started with it and say they’ve had a really positive and transformational experience. I don’t just mean friends but family as well. My father’s case is a perfect example – someone who lived his whole life bearing the trauma from (colonial) war and was never willing to pay meaningful attention to or look after his mental health. I’m convinced nothing good comes out of mental illness (contrary to what a certain kind of past romanticising of mental illness might lead us to believe) because it shuts us out from many parts of our lives; at the same time, when one happens to experience issues with one’s mental health, it’s for a reason, and a part of life in all its inherent complexity. As some Eastern philosophies say, the problem isn’t when someone finds themselves in a pit but rather when they get comfortable lying in it. Finding oneself in and then getting out of such a pit requires a lot of creativity. But also asking for help.

Susana Caló 

Nature is important to you as a field of study (ecology) and as a practice (sustainability). The cycle of the seasons, feeling the winter cold and the summer warmth on your body, energy, light and plant life. What can we learn from natural organisms in building our communities? How do we avoid monocultures of the mind? 

Isabel Carvalho 

My focus on nature (itself a contested idea) encompasses everything you mentioned and is certainly connected to my time living in the countryside. For much of my life, I spent half my time in a village in the Douro, where my father was a winemaker. So, it doesn’t stem from urban fatigue, something I’ve observed in many of my friends. Rather it stems from a desire to somehow integrate the country into the city. But then the way I think according to certain rhythms and cycles, as well as according to the seasons, is unique to me and part of my physical and mental ecology. I pay particular attention to how these patterns manifest in my person because I know they condition how I act, and I don’t feel inclined to try to influence or circumvent them. “Nature” isn’t something I want to control, and neither is it something I take lightly. Rather I always want to remain in dialogue with it. To show you what I mean, I’ll give you an example. I’d really like to learn how to prune trees – I already know the basics, but each time I do it, my feelings of respect for the unproductive branches of the tree make it difficult to do. I find myself asking whether they have any less right to be there than the branches that bear fruit. This doesn’t come from lacking evaluative judgment or just being nervous about cutting the tree but rather from how I think about different beings and their rights. But in any case, it goes something like this: I need a bit of winter cold just like the cabbages need a little winter frost to sweeten them up; I like fruit in season, and feel strange about seeing strawberries being sold in January; the April showers do get to me, but then the pea and bean blossoms flower get my spirits back on track; the May light rouses me along with the birds at four in the morning, and I can’t get back to sleep; in June, I drink fresh lemon-balm tea (which smells lovely but doesn’t taste great); in August, you’ll find me tracing remote country paths covered in brambles in the search for warm blackberries or figs from wild fig trees, all things I don’t need to pay for; and at the end of August I crave the thunder the same as the mountains do, in the hope that the water in their rivulets begins to run again . . . and then everything cycles back on itself, but is no longer the same as it was the year before. It’s a kind of repetition through difference that includes an element of the unexpected, and this is, and I really mean it, something I find completely marvellous. Other modes of living have people only feeling comfortable in homogenised environments (made possible by air conditioning, fruit from commercial greenhouses, etc.). I really don’t get that. Maybe some people with a different view would say I’m overly beholden to the idea of change and uncertainty, that this might have even become a pathological element in my character.  

Besides that, I’m really careful with the electronic devices I own, which I’ve noticed tend to last me years at a time. And the other day, when talking to the computer-repair person, I worriedly asked them whether extreme heat from climate change would have a negative effect on these devices. Now, if there’s anything harmful to the environment, as we know now, it’s the most common kinds of technology that appear the most innocuous and harmless. But isn’t that itself a reason for us to take good care of them? It’s worth doing insofar as it prevents needless consumption and therefore works against the exploitation of the earth where the ores have been dormant for millions of years? In other words, looking after our technology is a way of looking after our soils – not to mention a good way of looking after ourselves, lost as we are in the doom scroll. This discussion (about technology) might seem a wild digression from our conversation, but it really isn’t – it’s something I’m really interested in. Returning to what we were talking about beforehand, the ecological analysis of the socio-cultural and the mental (Guattari’s “three ecologies” were, if I remember correctly, the environment, social relations and human subjectivity) requires us to embrace the complex nature of diversity and allow ourselves to embody that diversity. For whatever reason, there’s a special satisfaction in engaging in ecstatic exercises that encourage such encounters with the richness of (a complex and varied) difference, and this, which doesn’t sound like much, is actually quite important, I think. Learning to live with difference in one’s community is a necessary part of living well. We can learn to do this by nurturing our curiosity, accepting and embracing more possible ways of being – including non-human ones. Interestingly the most recent studies on Alzheimer’s disease focus on personhood. The treatment focus has shifted in the direction of psychology and psychotherapy; this springs from the understanding that we shouldn’t write off an Alzheimer’s patient’s personhood, that there’s space for the patient to determine their own circumstances in a way that positively impacts their life. As is now well known, one of the most effective preventative measures for the disease is simply making friends and forging social bonds. But here, I’d venture that we must add another element besides human relationships: relationships with non-human things. To wrap up my thoughts, I’d say that trying to establish relationships with things (including with technology) as much as with other living beings, really, with everything in the world, can only be something positive as far as environment and mental health are concerned.

Susana Caló 

I’ve heard you use the term “cosmic encounter” several times, and I don’t think it’s by accident. 

Isabel Carvalho 

Yes, it’s something I talk about based on my intuition. Though it’s an idea I wish I’d engaged with more. Since I experience what I call “cosmic encounters” only very rarely. I have heard people say it’s our lack of trust in our intuition that prevents us from having such encounters more often. 

Susana Caló 

You’ve been active as an editor and publisher for many years now. It seems to me you purposely forge links between the people who cross each other’s paths by way of the projects you manage. And so you create community through your work, and thereby strengthen the fabric of collective creation. I think that’s a kind of feminist care practice. How do you choose the people you want to work with and the themes you cover in Leonorana, and what made you want to do this issue dedicated to mental health? 

Isabel Carvalho 

Perhaps the fantasy I have which I spoke about in my answer about communities will actually come true through Leonorana. I’m lucky to be able to decide on the themes and the people I would like to involve as I go along. And they might all be members of my cosmic encounter club. Right now, I’m working with three groups of people on three different issues coming out this year, which is a novelty because until now, Leonorana has only released one issue per year. As for the issue that’s currently furthest along (themed “nuclear”), it came about because of a reader who sent me a note saying she liked it via email. I replied, thanking her, and as the comments she’d written were so well put together, I decided to invite her to flesh them out so I could publish them in the next issue of the magazine since I was already at that point thinking of expanding on the kinds of material I incorporated into the magazine. But then she didn’t get back to me. Shortly afterwards, I happened to meet her in person at a launch event, and as she had recently moved to Oporto, I decided to propose a friendship date with her to help her settle into the city. Afterwards, I asked her to co-edit the magazine, and we did it all quite spontaneously, coming up with a theme and potential collaborators as we went along. That was Vanessa Badagliacca, who nowadays lives in Madrid. This experiment with her came about recently and has been unique, as indeed have all the others. Working with Catarina Rosendo on the theme of Care was a great adventure; and with Ang Kia Yee, too, during the pandemic, without us ever having met in person (which only happened some months later in Singapore). What makes the editorial process so valuable to me is being able to put into practice, experimentally and with quite a lot of freedom, certain guiding ideas that are very close to my heart, both when it comes to the guest editors I work with and the people who collaborate on the magazine. It also gives me – and the others – a chance to work collaboratively (both with each other and with our readers) on developing and adapting ideas in step with the ever-developing present. 

There hasn’t been much space for me to talk about how I, as editor of Leonorana, am a caregiver (which means a certain amount of time spent in relative isolation, quite removed from any social life), and the way this relates to how editors in general rely on a network of contacts for their work. In my case, this network has been built up bit by bit, very slowly, with connections often sparked by similar interests which later develop into close friendships. Perhaps all of this – our work conditions and our methods – make the magazine special. I think it's based on a critique at various levels, beginning with the integration of care into a professional practice. This issue dedicated to mental health has been a discovery. Of course the others have been too, but the difference here is that the theme was proposed to me by someone else. But as work progresses on the issue, I’m beginning to embrace it as if I had picked it myself. 

Drawing: © Clara Batalha / Isabel Carvalho, 2023.

Translation: Vita Dervan.

Leonorana magazine presents “We Care A Lot”, a series of conversations that place mental health at centre stage in understanding contemporary culture. Produced in partnership with maat for maat extended, this special issue of the magazine bears witness, through dialogues in different voices, to experiences of community, mutual care and happy interdependence currently being practised in the fields of art and culture. Recognising the breadth and nuances of contemporary thinking about care, this series – conceived by Isabel Carvalho and boasting the participation of Susana Caló, Nina Paim, Andrea Magalhães, the Pedreira collective and the Kosmicare collective – seeks to shine a spotlight on ways of living and thinking collectively, and allows us to see the ways mental health care practice asks us (and this is a good thing) to exist in relation to other beings, be they human or otherwise.